


Trespass

by hedgehugs



Category: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series
Genre: Awkward Sexual Situations, F/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Tenderness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-28
Updated: 2014-09-28
Packaged: 2018-02-19 01:30:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2369453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hedgehugs/pseuds/hedgehugs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wanting to be wanted is a powerful drug. Being wanted is even more so.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trespass

**Author's Note:**

> This reflects my experiences as a survivor of sexual trauma and this is not supposed to be "hot" in any way, uh. It's just something that's been kicking around my head. Warnings for kind of questionable consent stuff, casual ableism (e.g. "crazy").

“WHAT A SHOCK WHEN THEY TELL YOU  
IT WON'T HURT AND YOU ALMOST  
TURN INSIDE OUT WHEN THEY BEGIN.”  
\-- Jenny Holzer

* * *

 

They’ve been picking their way through the states for weeks. Maybe months, but Kate's forgotten now and they hardly stay in one place long enough for her to buy a calendar. It's her and the two-bit thief, her and Seth. She weighs that phrase in her head a lot, and in comparison to ditching the corpse of her father and her turned-monstrous-but-still-breathing-brother in some Mayan temple, an eighteen year old girl hanging around some bank robber in his late twenties is downright normal.

Preferable, even.

That’s what she tells herself while she’s sitting shotgun in some shitty non-descript car he lifted from a used car lot. He made a point to sell the Corvette for every penny it was worth – he got loud and angry and waved his hands a lot at the dealer -- and she stood fifty feet back from the raised voices, feeling some sort of familial embarrassment over his, uh, behavior.

So now she’s stuck in this shithole car sitting next to him and they’re on the road. Again.

The interior of the car – she doesn’t know what kind, doesn’t care, she’s just glad he got one with working A/C and a radio – is completely trashed. Fast food wrappers litter the floor in the backseat and the passenger, crumpled up and dirtied road maps accenting the mess in the front. The backseat is covered in stacked boxes that block the view of the rearview mirror, and it makes her feel like she’s moving, but there aren’t any kitchen lamps inside of the cardboard mountain. They mostly consist of sharpened wooden stakes and gallon jugs of holy water.

(They had stopped at a Catholic church on their way out of Texas and Seth paid a priest fifty bucks to bless as much water as he was willing to, Kate was embarrassed and quietly disgusted.)

Neither of them boasts an extensive wardrobe, and all of their belongings are stuffed into two duffel bags along with the rest of their personal items, stashed in the tiny trunk. Upon every re-packing of the car the bags are unceremoniously flattened and settled over the small armory Seth insisted on assembling.

The exterior of the car is decent, and she can’t find it in herself to complain about it. It’s dirty blue, and it won’t get them noticed.

Seth fiddles with the radio (he does this constantly), searching and scanning to make sure they’re flying under the radar – they haven’t heard anything Gecko-related in months? months. but he is always suspicious and wary, and checks daily. Kate is slumped in the passenger seat, the cheap sunglasses she bought resting stickily on the bridge of her nose, bare feet on the dash. They’re somewhere in the Southwest, Arizona maybe, and the sun filters easily through the windshield and windows of the car, baking them alive.

He may have picked a car with air conditioning, but he doesn’t really use it.

She stretches and folds her seat back further and shoots him a look that he doesn’t catch. His eyes are even and attentive and his expression is blank aside from his mouth moving silently to himself as he presses the buttons on the radio with the forefingers of his right hand. He stops on an oldies station and his hand pauses and then returns to the wheel. His face softens and he blinks and rolls his shoulders, he keeps watching the road. She watches him fondly.

A new song starts seconds after the previous ends, and he turns to her, looks down and angled at her leaning back in her seat.

“Do you know who this is?” Kate scrunches her nose at him, and pulls the sunglasses away from her face before scrubbing her eyes with the heel of her hand.

“No, why?”

He makes a disbelieving face at her, eyebrows pulling down and mouth quirking sideways. He turns away and faces the road. She frowns at the side of his face indignantly and adjusts her seat so she’s vertical again.

“Can’t believe you can’t recognize Elvis.” His voice crackles toward the end and it’s kind and that makes her more irritated.

“I know who Elvis is, sorry I can’t recognize every piece of music he’s produced.” Kate’s tongue is sharp, has always been sharp, but she’s been loosing it on him more frequently.

Seth turns toward her again and raises his eyebrows and a hand at her, “Holy shit, calm down princess,” and she makes an ugly face at him when he cracks a smile. She continues scowling when he turns away and mutters under his breath “take a joke.” Her gut twists and she pushes her sunglasses back up her nose aggressively and angles away from him, facing the window.

She feels petty and wants to say something to hurt him, but pushes the thought away and instead picks at the peeling material under the window. Kate doesn’t look away from what she’s doing and pulls her top lip against her bottom teeth and asks, “Have you heard from Richie again?”

She swears she can hear him white-knuckle the steering wheel and stiffen his spine, and his voice is tense and closed-off when it finally crawls out of his chest.

“No. Last I heard from him was when we were in Albuquerque.” His voice is uneven and harsh, but Kate nods at this, remembers the phone call vividly, how Seth’s hands shook and his voice sounded like a skinned knee. They had been holed up in a cheap motel, sitting on the ends of their respective beds when his phone buzzed, and alarmed, he had answered it. Seth had told his brother to “– get fucked,” then bitterly, “oh, wait”, and had flipped his burner phone shut and tossed it.

She only remembers this vividly because she wanted to know if Richie had asked about her. And that she didn’t realize she was crying until Seth asked her why she was.

So they don’t talk about him, and Kate feels guilty for reopening that wound and asking, but not that guilty. There is something in his voice that she doesn’t like, or trust (which seems to cover a lot of traits regarding Seth Gecko). She mumbles a response, something like “sorry for asking” but not in any identifiable language and he doesn’t respond, just keeps driving with his white knuckled grip.         

* * *

The bank robber and the preacher’s daughter decided to occupy a hole-in-the-wall single-story motel in some city a hundred miles out of Phoenix. It’s called the Desert Flower Inn and  Kate’s grateful that her initial locational assumption was right. When she’s able to check the date in the owner’s office, she is floored that it’s late September – the 24th – and that she is much worse at keeping track of time than she had thought.

They’re in room 105 and it’s nicer than she thought it’d be. The carpet is clean (ish) and so are the walls and bathroom (ish). It even has a TV (ish. it’s tiny and looks like it’s from the Stone Age).

Kate flops down on the farthest bed from the door, claiming it. Both of the beds are queens and have cream colored sheets and dark red comforters. She inhales the scent of musty laundry detergent that clings to the comforter and thinks about the way Seth spoke to her in the car about his brother. She doesn’t know whether his reaction was from guilt or hurt, but she has a rotten feeling in her gut that bubbles and curdles. The clicking of the overhead fan keeps her from delving too far into her thoughts, and she sits up and shifts so she’s leaning against the headboard, cautiously eying Seth as he brings in the boxes and duffel bags from the car.

He opens his mouth to ask for help but she catches him before the words are audible and slides off the bed, her slim feet quietly thudding across the carpeted room and then slapping on the hot pavement when she reaches the parking lot. She returns with two stacked on top of each other and piles them with the others under the complimentary hotel desk. He doesn’t like them to sit in the car.

Seth grunts a ‘thanks’ before excusing himself to the bathroom to shower, locking the door behind him and starting the water. Kate stares at the closed door and sits back down on her bed, folding her legs under her, bare in her tattered shorts, unshaven because she has stopped caring. She wants to ask him about the car, but she’s too late now and doesn’t feel like talking to a brick wall.

His bag is sitting at the foot of his bed and Kate can feel her fingers itch. She wonders if this is how Seth feels when he sees a bank, like there are spider webs in his fingertips pulling him toward it, egging him on. She crosses the room hesitantly, listening for the shower and making sure the water is still running. His duffel is navy blue and she unzips it painstakingly slowly, trying to keep as quiet as possible, which she reasons is slightly ridiculous, he’s in the shower, he can’t hear anything.

The top layer is mostly clothes: his bloodied suit, poorly folded shirts and pants, some jeans, a pair of tattered sweats that she knows he sleeps in, some underwear and undershirts. Underneath is his notebook and his flip phones -- he keeps several. She doesn’t really “get” criminals but apparently this is something they all do, keep disposable communication around and trash it when shit hits the fan.  Well, not trash it; burn it.

But she’s not looking for his burner phones; she knows he has his real one somewhere. Kate digs deeper into his bag until she’s at the bottom, and there’s still nothing. Her hair is stringy and hanging in her face and she straightens up, pushes it behind her ears while she chews on the inside of her cheek and looks at the bag. She carefully replaces the contents as accurately as possible, silently chiding herself for not taking things out then replacing them immediately. The water is still running, and she can feel her blood hot in her veins like tar.

Anxiety and guilt gnaws at her stomach lining when she zips close the bag, gives it a once over and then stops. Cold sweat coats her palms when she realizes she forgot to check the side pockets. The first one she unzips – thank God – is the right one. Kate lifts the phone out of the pocket with careful fingers, opens it, and there’s three recent messages from Richie, replied to, noticed, read: existent.

She lets out a heavy breath, it forces its way out of her lungs and threatens to transform into a sob but she holds it from becoming that. Cradles her voice to her chest and keeps it from making a sound. She reads them:

The first,

“meet me in Sedona. 22nd, -R”

“no”  
  
another,

“please -R”

“no”  
  
the last.

“please -R”

“Kirkland. Desert Flower Inn. 24th. one time only.”  


Her jaw aches and she realizes she’s been grinding her teeth, working the muscles in her jaw to keep her heart from spurting out of her mouth. Every muscle in Kate’s body is taut and tense and she resists the urge to lock her knees.

She shouldn’t be surprised that she was lied to by a professional thief, a professional conman, a professional liar, but somehow, she is. Her throat hurts. She closes the phone, shoves it back into the bag and zips it. She can feel the tips of her ears and the spaces between her toes and she is hyperaware of everything. The room is too big and too small, and she notices that the water isn’t running anymore. And she feels a pair of eyes on her. And she turns around.

Seth is leaning easily against the bathroom door, hair wet and eyes bright, wearing the same pants as earlier. He’s all too casual, and grins with his wolf-mouth at her. She can feel her lungs drop into her stomach. They splash. His voice is singsong.  “What’d you find little lady?” His smile is not predatory but somewhat forced, all white teeth and rough stubble carved into his face.

She doesn’t bother trying to play it off, her face is stark and white and her mouth feels like sandpaper and gravel. “You lied to me.” Her words taste like a papercut and she tries to keep herself from trembling. His face softens, but only a little.

“Yeah. I did.” Seth walks over and sits on the side of her bed, not-quite looking at her. She relaxes slightly, lets her shoulders drop.

“Why did you? Why would you lie about that?” She wants to walk over to him and touch his face and then wrap her hands around his throat and shake an answer out of his teeth. Her face feels hot and flushed and she settles heavily next to him, forces herself into his space, see look, I’m not afraid of you.

“It wasn’t the right time. I didn’t want him to come in the first place. He’s not my brother.” His words spill out of him now, a river full of muddy water coming undammed. Kate blinks and breathes. Seth keeps his place next to her. Tries not to smell gasoline and lighter fluid and dried blood. Fails. “I didn’t want to see him again.” She flares up at this, and she’s not quiet anymore, electricity crackles from her chest and fills her mouth and voice.

“Did you ever once think about what I might want? Did you ever think about me?” She is loud and accusatory, stands up, faces him and her eyes are cold and narrow.

Seth dips his head and runs his hands through his short dark hair, his voice scratches when he answers her, and tells her, “No.” His voice is strained and dispassionate and makes her hollow in her ribs.  Kate feels like her brain is going to slip out of her ears and she can feel hot saltwater boiling behind her eyes and she tries so hard not to cry.

“I want to see him.” And Seth lifts his head and looks at her, and his eyes are soft now and sad. Her insides ache a little less and she looks at him, stares him down. He straightens his back and wipes at his face with his hand.

“Okay, you will. I’m sorry. I fucked up.” He sounds honest, and apologetic, and she believes him, really. This isn’t like in the car when she could hear the waver and the lie in his voice, this is genuine and sincere. He stands and moves to the window and moves the blinds and it’s almost dark, the light is shrinking from the sky before their eyes. “He’ll be here soon.”

She wants to ask if he’ll be with her, but doesn’t know if it’s a given, doesn’t want it to be. She asks, “Will he be coming alone?” and Seth snorts at her, lets the blind drop.

“He will be, if he knows what’s good for him.”

* * *

It’s a quarter to ten when Richie finally does show up. Seth is reading and dozing on his bed dark eyes flicking shut and then open, quickly and frantically, and Kate’s watching some old TV show, forcing herself to smile at it.

The knock at the door startles both of them, and Seth is on his feet quicker than Kate can react. She curls in on herself, and then stretches before getting up to turn off the television. She’s following Seth closely when he crosses the small room to the door, almost runs into his back when he stops short of the doorframe. He turns to her and eyes her carefully, his voice is tight and curt and nervous sounding.

“Don’t do anything stupid. If I say run, we run. Everything will be fine.” Kate cocks her head to one side, wonders when he lost so much faith in his brother then realizes Seth doesn’t really consider Richie his blood any more. So she stays close behind him when he opens the door stiffly, locked joints and tense line of a mouth.

Richie looks the same, maybe paler, staying out of the sun at risk of burning to death will do that to you, she supposes. His eyes are the same, blue and unhappy, and his hair is slicked back, but seems longer. Seth just stares at Richie, he stands like he’s full of grain and sand and he can’t move, or like he’s deciding what to do, to kill him or hold him. The younger brother doesn’t move while the older brother doesn’t move even more thoroughly. The young woman pokes her head out from behind the older brother, and looks up at the younger brother. Everyone just looks at each other.

“Seth—“ Richie starts, steps forward into their space, face pleading and twisted. Seth just steps back, one arm behind him pushing Kate behind him as they back into their motel room.

“Save it, Richard.” Seth’s voice is hard and sounds like a rubber band snapping. Kate moves anxiously and cautiously, steps around Seth to really look at Richie, study his face and see if anything has changed. She looks at his mouth a lot. He gives her a small smile, even white teeth in a row. Nothing sharp.

He’s dressed casual, Kate thinks this is the first time she hasn’t seen him in some sort of a suit. Just a white button-down and some dark jeans and boots. Normal. Not a bank robber or a vampire just, sort of normal. He doesn’t have his glasses and she guesses superhumans don’t need corrective lenses. She vaguely misses them.

“Can I come in?” Richie’s voice is soft and the same as she remembers. Instinctively she nods but Seth turns his head and gives her a dirty look which he then aims at his brother.

He’s casual, “Isn’t that a vampire thing? Can’t come in until you’re given permission?” he sneers at Richie and moves aside, exaggeratedly waving him in.

“Actually Seth, it’s common decency.” his voice has turned hard and his eyes match it when he looks at his brother, and Kate can feel the tension in the room, can taste it and it’s rancid on her tongue. She stands abruptly, moves to the door.

“I’ll be back soon.”

And she’s out, doesn’t bother to put on shoes. The two men watch her leave, faintly worried for her. She heads past the parking lot, toward a gas station, realizing she doesn’t have any money as soon as she enters the building. She doesn’t particularly care.

The brothers are back together in the hotel room and she is escaping them, and she is reminded very suddenly of the months before, and being crammed into a little bathroom with them and hearing their bickering for one of the first times. She almost felt nostalgic. She swipes a soda and a candy bar and hides it under her shirt on the way out. She doesn’t get caught.

Kate sits outside of the room for a little while, listens and doesn’t hear anything. She drinks her soda, eats her candy. Stashes the wrappers into the tiny pocket of her shorts and waits longer. It has been about an hour when she decides to go in, stands and knocks on the door, pauses, then opens it.

She doesn’t know what she expected, but Seth isn’t there, it’s just Richie, and he’s sitting back on her bed reading the same book Seth was with the same drowsy look in his eyes.

“I was wondering when you were going to come back.” His voice is lazy and comes out as a drawl. She shrugs, eyes him and then resigns to sitting on the edge of Seth’s bed, not-really watching him. He is watching her though, carefully and thoughtfully. She feels funny.

“Where’s Seth?” She asks him and then realizes she really doesn’t care. She appreciates what the older brother has done for her but they bicker and they argue, and she doesn’t particularly feel like spending time with him right now. Kate chews her bottom lip and shifts on the bed, tensing and untensing her legs.

“He’s out.” Richie makes a noncommittal gesture at the door. “He left a little bit after you did.”

“Oh.”

She wants to ask him what he’s been doing but she’s afraid he’ll answer it with whom. She remembers kissing him in the bar, not sure of herself and desperate, how his mouth felt. She can’t stop thinking about it when she looks at him. It’s mixed with repulsion and anger and a raw and scabby feeling of abandonment.

Kate feels like she was not picked. She tells herself she wasn’t even in the choices, wasn’t even a runner up, but that does not sate the way her stomach feels like chalky swamp water. It hurts. He just continues to look at her, studies her face in a not unkind way. She wonders if he thinks about it the way that she does, hauntingly, and horrifically detailed. She wants to know he kissed her back. Wants to know if he’d do it again.

Instead she just asks him how he’s been.

He lifts his shoulders, shrugs. “Can’t complain.” And she imagines, yeah, you cannot get sick, cannot really die, can’t get hurt, why would you. Richie raises his eyebrows at her appraisingly, “What about you?”

She bites her lip, worries it between her teeth. “Lonely.” She admits, moving and fussing with her hair, something to do with her hands. “Your brother and I don’t really get along.” Richie grins at that, a real one, big smile breaking his face in half.

“I can imagine that.”  He says very politely, setting aside his book and sitting up, facing her directly now. “I missed you.” He ducks his face and almost moves to push up his glasses, before realizing there isn’t anything there. “I hope that’s not weird.”

Bubbles of thick black goo fill Kate’s stomach and she smiles, small, cautious. She sits straighter now, folds her hands in her lap. “It’s not.” She admits. She reaches out and takes one of his hands in hers, like in the RV, like when she prayed. His hands are so big in her small ones, and she thumbs over the top kindly. Richie’s skin is colder than human, but not ice-cold. It’s okay. It’s not bizarre. She shivers, but not because of the temperature.

Kate and Richie hold hands like this for a little while, her thumbing over the backs of his hands, thinking to herself. She is so tired. She is so tired of being around Seth and feeling like a burden, being shotgun and being a hold back on his life. She can taste the bitter disappointment in the air every time the two of them drive past a bank. It’s not like that with Richie, because maybe he gets the burden feelings, too.

Seth told her about Vanessa one night after he came home to the motel after a couple of beers. He was sad and his shoulders were heavy and he told her about how his ex-wife thought his little brother was crazy. And how he had to take care of his crazy little brother. And that he loved his ex-wife, and his crazy brother, but those things could not coexist. Kate helped him to bed and hoped he forgot what he said in the morning.

So she wonders if Richie gets it, and maybe wants to be something other than a burden too. A part of her hopes that Santanico makes him feel better, but a petty part of her hopes the opposite. She grips his hand tighter and he looks at her intently, eyes wide and mouth open slightly, questioning.

Kate wants to kiss him again, very badly, she wants to be wanted, and wants to be wanted by this man. So she does. She leans across the gap of the bed and he stiffens his body when she gets closer, holds the tension when their lips meet. He tastes like cigarettes and something rotten, and toothpaste. She doesn’t mind. He pulls away from her, abruptly, sharply, narrows his eyes.

“What are you doing?” Richie’s voice is caked with suspicion like a layer of blood, and she just looks at him with as much confidence as she could muster.

“I’m kissing you, because I want to. I’d like it if you kissed me back.” Her voice is shaking and she looks him in the eye, her insides churning and bubbling. Kate spans the gap of the bed again and this time situates herself in his lap, straddling him. He looks at her and cautiously places his hands on her waist, smoothing his fingers along her sides, carefully, warily.

“Are you sure?” This time his voice has been scraped of the suspicion, and the tone underneath is raw and fractured. His fingers are light on her through the fabric of her shirt and she shifts against him, pressing into him.

“Yeah, I’m sure; I’ve wanted this for a while.” That’s not a lie, she tells herself. Thinking about something like this has kept her up at night, pooled heat in her belly, down low where no one sees. It was not always him, only the first few times, when she still thought of the kiss more often than not. Lately it had been shadow faces, but Richie had always been in the back of her mind.

So he pulls her to him, kisses her, and this is firm and very adult and not like French-kissing Kyle in the back of church, not by a long shot.  His hands are at her waist but move, lower to hold her hips and then back, flattening over her ass, squeezing and kneading. She makes a noise deep in her throat, a rumble that surprises her, and bites at his bottom lip. He jerks a little in surprise but lets her, in an imagined somewhat bemused way.

She has her arms around his neck, kissing him hard, her mouth feeling swollen and bruised when she feels his fingers lift at the bottom of her shirt and she freezes for a second before relaxing, and letting him. This was something she could handle, something that she wanted. Richie ran his hands up her sides, feather light, almost tickling, before moving one of his hands to carefully cup her breast, bare under her shirt.

Kate makes a face, scrunches her nose and presses her hips downward into his before moving one of her hands and carefully guiding his hand away, away and down because up there she felt like a  little girl and this is not the time she wanted to feel like that. She presses his hand to the place between her legs where it aches, and he flattens his palm pressing upward against her, and she whimpers.

He’s essentially silent through this, grunts a little when she rubs herself down against him where he’s hard in his jeans, but focuses on her. She’s soft and pliant beneath his hands, and he encircles her in his arms, starts to move her, when she stops him.

“What are you doing?” This time it’s her who’s asking and her voice is high and tight and she can hear how whiny it sounds.

“Just let me, you’ll like it.” Richie’s voice is even and assured, she feels so little. And she’s tense and quiet now, because he lays her sprawled out on her back, and moves down her body and she thinks he’s going to try to put his mouth on her, and this makes her stomach drop and makes her throat tight.

“Please don’t take them off.” The words come out too fast of her mouth and she doesn’t know if he hears them, but he doesn’t move to pull her shorts down, instead he fits a knee into the space between her legs and presses against her. She keens, angling herself against him, trying to find the friction.

He lets Kate do this, rut against his leg, and pull at his hair, while he mouths at her neck and presses his lips against hers. Somewhere along the line it stops feeling good to her, stops being pleasing, starts boring her and she stills beneath him, wiggles away.

“Can we just lay together?” Her voice is small, crawls out of a secret place in her. Richie just looks at her, slightly confused, curved line of a mouth, and he gives her a small tight lipped smile, nods at her.

“Of course.” Always the gentleman and she’s tired of pretending. So when he turns and goes to hold her, she does her best to burrow into his arms and hide her face against his chest. And he lets her, because he wants her. And she feels wanted. But she also feels unclean. She feels like a dormouse moving into hibernation, and she closes her eyes against him and settles in, like for a long winter’s nap. He strokes her hair, tenderly, but distanced. They rest.


End file.
